Kolkata, West Bengal
Just as gravity is a self-evident truth for the Earth, so is the human desire to hear stories. People love tales of kings and emperors just as much as they love stories of poor Brahmins or woodcutters living at the edge of a forest.
Storytellers come with all kinds of personalities, and so do their stories, each with its own uniqueness. Not every story is based on real events. Many are built around animals, birds, or imaginary characters. Sometimes the goal is to establish a sense of morality and justice, sometimes simply to entertain. However, a story is made when it passes from one person’s mouth to another’s, it changes, bits are added or left out, and sometimes entirely new stories grow from old foundations. In the era I’m referring to, writing anything down was not an easy task. So it's often very difficult to say who exactly created a particular tale. Over hundreds of years, such a vast collection of stories has come into being that it can only be compared to an ocean. And this comparison holds not just in terms of scale.
Just as rivers from different regions bring different qualities of water into the sea, water mixed with the rain that has washed over many lands, so too is this ocean of stories enriched by tales from many different places.
At some point, someone must have felt the need to preserve these stories in written form. But the person who wrote them down cannot really claim to be their creator. And yet, someone did create them. And each of those stories has its own journey like a river flowing toward the sea. And that journey gave birth to another story—the story of how the Kathāsaritsāgara (Ocean of the Streams of Stories) came to be. That story is told within the book itself.
The Kathāsaritsāgara that we know was composed in Sanskrit by Somadeva Bhatt. The story was originally written by a man named Guṇāḍhya in a regional language called Paiśācī. There’s a reason why Guṇāḍhya chose to write in Paiśācī, rejecting Sanskrit, Prakrit, and other local languages. That reason itself is a story. I won’t go into that here, but what’s important to know is this: Guṇāḍhya’s decision to use Paiśācī is closely tied to the origins of a condensed version of Pāṇini’s grammar, known as the Kalāpa Grammar.
Even though Guṇāḍhya wrote his stories in the Paiśācī language, he had actually heard them in a different tongue—from someone known as Kānabhūti of the Vindhya forest. Kānabhūti, in turn, had heard the stories from another scholar named Bharṛuchi. And how Bharṛuchi became a scholar, why he left Magadha in northern India to go south into the Vindhya forest, and why he narrated these stories to Kānabhūti—that’s a whole entertaining tale in itself.
But what matters is this: as soon as Bharṛuchi and Kānabhūti met, the stories of the Kathāsaritsāgara came flooding back to Kānabhūti—stories he had heard in a previous birth from none other than Lord Shiva. Well, not directly. Shiva had narrated the stories to Parvati. Here’s how it happened:
One day, Parvati praised Shiva with such devotion that he was deeply pleased and wanted to offer her a boon. She requested to hear stories—completely new ones, stories that no one had ever heard before. Shiva agreed and began to narrate, while Nandi stood guard outside. Meanwhile, one of Shiva’s attendants, Pushpadanta, came to see him, but Nandi blocked his way.
Pushpadanta, however, was not one to give up easily. He assumed a subtle, invisible form and managed to overhear the stories. Not only did he listen to them, but he also later recounted them to his wife, Jaya. Now, Jaya had no idea that these stories were supposed to be top secret—so she repeated them to Parvati herself.
As expected, Parvati became furious with Shiva: “So this is your idea of a new story? Then how does Jaya already know it?” Shiva immediately entered deep meditation and uncovered what had happened. Parvati’s anger turned to Pushpadanta, and she cursed him to be born on Earth as a mortal.
Pushpadanta’s friend Malyavān pleaded with Parvati to lift the curse. Not only did Parvati refuse, she also cursed Malyavān to take human birth as well. On Earth, Pushpadanta was reborn as Bharṛuchi, and Malyavān as Guṇāḍhya.
But a curse always comes with a path to redemption. Parvati said that if Bharṛuchi told these stories to Kānabhūti, he would be freed from the curse. And so he did. Kānabhūti, too, was living a human life because of a curse from Kubera. His release would only come if he passed on the stories heard from Bharṛuchi to Guṇāḍhya.
But Guṇāḍhya wasn’t simply going to listen to the stories and write them down for no reason. He too was cursed by Parvati and reborn as a human. His condition for liberation was to spread these stories in the world. That’s why he wrote them down—in the Paiśācī language, using his own blood.
The lives of Bharṛuchi and Guṇāḍhya are tied to various historical events—for example, the role of Chanakya (Kauṭilya) in placing Chandragupta Maurya on the throne, or tales of the Sātavāhana kings. Guṇāḍhya himself was once a minister in the court of a Sātavāhana king. After completing the Kathāsaritsāgara, he gave the manuscript to his disciples and sent it to the king for public dissemination.
But the king, seeing that the manuscript was written in blood—and in the obscure Paiśācī language—immediately rejected it. Deeply humiliated, Guṇāḍhya went into the forest, lit a fire, and began to burn the pages of his manuscript—seven stories comprising 700,000 verses, written over seven years.
Before tossing each page into the fire, he would read it aloud. Hearing his storytelling, wild animals and birds gathered around him, listening, mesmerized. They even stopped eating, engrossed entirely in the tales. This led to a strange consequence: because the animals weren’t eating, the king’s hunting game began to dwindle, affecting his health and well-being.
When the king investigated the cause, he discovered that it all traced back to the very manuscript he had rejected. He went himself to the forest to stop Guṇāḍhya from burning the stories. He promised to have them shared with the world.
But by then, six of the seven stories—comprising 600,000 verses—had already turned to ash. Only one story remained, containing 100,000 verses: the tale of Naravāhanadatta. The king took this and, with the help of two of Guṇāḍhya’s disciples, had it rendered into Sanskrit.
Thus, was born the text called Kathāpīṭha. And in this way, the stories that once flowed from the mouth of Shiva found their way into the world.
Even though it's referred to as a single story by name, this narrative is actually a rich blend of many sub-stories from various directions. It includes episodes from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Puranas. Besides these, several other independent works also find a place within this grand tale—such as the Vetāla Panchaviṃshati (Twenty-five Tales of the Vampire), the Batrish Singhasan (Thirty-two Throne Stories), and the Panchatantra. It is a harmonious fusion of folklore, moral tales, mythology, and history—making it apt to be compared to a vast ocean.
The story introduced at the beginning of Kathāsaritsāgara eventually culminates in the creation of the book called Kathāpīṭha. But as we move into the historical period, we see that from Guṇāḍhya’s original compilation, the Buddhist poet Kṣemendra composed the Bṛhatkathāmañjarī, while the Brahmanical poet Somadeva Bhatt authored the Kathāsaritsāgara.
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